The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 We posted recently an
issue
affecting XML rendering in IE after an installation of Netscape 8. Netscape has just released an updated version that addresses this issue and is
available at
http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/
Thanks to Netscape for making
this update available so that this will no longer be an issue.
-Dave

Hello. My name is Jeremy Dallman. I am the project manager for Internet Explorer security bulletins.
I am announcing the availability of the June 2005 security updates . This group of security updates is available via Windows Update and includes a Critical fix for Internet Explorer.
Information about the IE Security update can be found at: MS05-025 – Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (883939)
This security update package contains fixes for the following vulnerabilities:
...

Hi, I’m John Bedworth, the Development Manager for
Internet Explorer Security. I wanted to address some of the excellent questions
that came up in the feedback to Rob Franco’s " Clarifying Low-Rights IE " post.
How is "low-rights" IE
different than, in XP, running as a regular (limited) user? At home, I use a
limited user account--is there anything about low-rights IE that is different
than my situation?
The primary difference is that IE 7 on Longhorn
will be running...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 Before we start let me shortly introduce Adrian Bateman. He is the developer
currently working on our IE7 print experience. Since he works out of Microsoft's
offices in Reading, England, we are much better now at printing “tomatoes”.
Without further ado:
Today, there is a well known problem with
printing from Internet Explorer where the layout of the page sometimes...

Hi, I’m Rob
Franco, Lead Program Manager for IE Security. Today I want to focus on clearing
up a few details about an important feature that we’re calling “Low-Rights IE”.
“Low-Rights IE” is one of several new features that we’re working on to help
keep users safe. It is a defense-in-depth feature, meant to back up and support
the many other security features.
First, while
most IE7 security features will be available in IE7 for Windows XP SP2,
Low-rights IE will only be available...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 Before I joined the Internet Explorer team, I worked on the
Microsoft Office Online website. Handling massive amounts of traffic, we
faced some performance challenges that forced me to dig into the guts of HTTP
performance. The output of that effort was twofold:
Microsoft Fiddler , and documentation of some best practices for web
performance optimization. ...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 The Internet Explorer team has a number of positions open that we are working to fill with exceptional people.
Our newest open position is for a
Programming Writer position for work on the SDK documentation for IE7. If you search on the Microsoft Careers page, you can find out about our other open positions , which include Developers, Software Testers, Builders, even an Evangelist position. Come work...

There are two important events that will happen to the support policy for Windows 2000 after June 30th of this year.
First, support for both IE 5.01 SP3 and IE 6 SP1 on Windows 2000 SP3 will expire. Users running IE 5.01 or IE 6 SP1 on Windows 2000 should upgrade to Windows 2000 SP4 in order to continue to receive security updates.
Second, Windows 2000 SP4 moves from mainstream to extended support. The key difference between mainstream support and extended support which I think is most relevant...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 Hey, I’m Tony Schreiner, a developer on the IE team. I’ve been working on IE for a little over a year, and at Microsoft for over six years. My personal blog is over here , but I'm posting on the official IE blog to help consolidate useful information about IE7.
My role has been to re-architect IE to support tabbed browsing. This work began last year and includes building...

We’ve just confirmed an issue that has started to be reported on newsgroups and forums that after installing Netscape 8 the XML rendering capabilities of Internet Explorer no longer work. That means that if you navigate in IE to an XML file such as an RSS feed http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss.xml or an XML file with an XSLT transformation applied then rather than seeing the data you are presented with a blank page.
We currently have the following work around for people that are hitting this issue...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 Hi my name is Markus Mielke and I am a Program Manager working with Chris Wilson on CSS and platform support. Today, I would like to talk about DOM Inspectors for IE.
For analyzing web pages and drilling down into problems on a page it becomes more and more important to have a DOM Inspector handy. Not a full fledged debugger but something quick that allows a user to explore their HTML document and understand...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 I've received enough questions in email from different people about a recent vulnerability in another browser that I wanted to post something here.
I think the best place for the facts is with the people responsible for the browser. I say this based on the number of articles I read that misrepresent issues in Windows and IE.
I also think that security is an industry...

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 is fast approaching. A tiny but significant code change was checked in this week: Internet Explorer's new User-Agent string.
The User-Agent (or UA) string is sent along in the headers of every HTTP request so the server knows what type of browser is making the request. For a quick introduction on handling of the User-Agent string, check out George Shephard's article in MSDN Magazine.
Internet Explorer 7 User-Agent
As we updated the User-Agent, we considered application...

My name is Sam Fortiner and I’m a developer on the Internet Explorer team here at Microsoft. I joined the company about a year ago when I was given the opportunity to work on IE. Since then I’ve worked on several aspects of IE and recently settled down into the layout and display team. As part of my work in this team, I implemented support for per-pixel alpha in PNGs.
Support for per-pixel alpha in PNGs in IE, or transparent PNGs as I’ll refer to them going forward, has been called many things...

We’ve heard some great feedback on what web developers would like to see in IE7, both from the responses to my last post and from the resources I referred to. The rest of the team was cranking away while I was away on parental leave, and I wanted to share a few details about what they were doing: The first couple of things they’ve done are:
Support the alpha channel in PNG images. We’ve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We...

Quite a bit has been written about the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol and its successor Transport Layer Security (TLS), so I won't cover the protocols in detail here. The following are good references if you want to get a quick refresher.
Microsoft KB article describing the SSL Handshake
Wikipedia Overview of TLS
Happily, a majority of web users now know to look for the lock icon and the HTTPS in the address line to identify when their connection is secure. Unfortunately, relatively...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 Jeremy Mazner just posted news on his blog that there is a position opening for a technical evangelist focusing on IE. That’s great news! Working either on or with the IE team is definitely a great experience.
Thanks -Dave

Hello. My name is Al Billings and I'm a test engineer on the Internet Explorer test team posting to the IE Blog for the first time.
I want to announce that the April 2005 security updates are available and that a critical update for Internet Explorer is included:
MS05-020 – Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (890923)
This contains fixes for the following vulnerabilities:
DHTML Object Memory Corruption Vulnerability ( CAN-2005-0553 )
URL Parsing Memory Corruption...

From time to time, I've heard the question: "Why can IE only download two files from the same site simultaneously?"
Some more savvy users observe that this limitation probably makes sense in dialup cases where bandwidth is constrained or when lots of small files are being downloaded, since the TCP/IP slow start algorithm comes into play.
But for those of us lucky enough to be on broadband, this limitation can be annoying. If I want to download a large number of large files, I have to sit around...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 Our documentation team has just completed updating our documentation covering how administrators and developers can control certain features. This includes the following articles:
About Zone Elevation
Introduction to Feature Controls
About URL Security Zone Templates
These documents are useful in understanding the security work undertaken in Windows XP SP2...

With so many customers relying on IE, it helps to get a solid grasp of the Windows Lifecycle Policy , which at first blush can appear to be a bit cryptic. Fortunately I think I can shed some light on Microsoft’s policy with these simple rules: We support the version of IE that shipped with an OS or Service Pack for as long as the OS or Service Pack is supported We support the latest standalone version of IE (that’d be IE 6 SP1) on every OS that’s still supported (unless superseded by a newer version...

My name is Tariq Sharif and I am a program manager in the IE security and networking team. I joined IE team shortly after Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released. Windows XP Service Pack 2 introduced many new security features for Internet Explorer, which can cause compatibility issues for some web applications and sites. In order to help solve such issues I am pleased to announce that the Internet Explorer Compatibility Evaluator (IECE) is now available. IECE is released as part of Microsoft Application...

As a little kid, my dad read with me a lot; we usually read detective stories. While of questionable literary merit, those books developed in me a burning desire to figure stuff out, to pull back the curtain, to understand the mysterious. I still maintain that curiosity today-- I joined the IE team because I wanted to learn the browser inside out, and I developed Microsoft Fiddler to expose the secrets of HTTP in a user-friendly way. I recently came across a bug in the bug database for IE7 which...

First of all, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Chris Wilson; I’m the lead program manager for the web platform in IE. (I am NOT Chris Wilson the drummer for Good Charlotte. :^) ) I joined the IE team shortly before we shipped IE 2.0 in 1995, and worked in various releases for every major release from then until IE 6.0’s release in 2001. After IE 6.0 shipped, I worked on the Avalon project until I decided to rejoin the IE team four months ago. During my tenure on the IE team, I’ve frequently...

With the Local Machine Zone Lockdown introduced in Windows XP SP2 an HTML file on your hard drive will no longer be able to run script and active content without user permissions being granted through the information bar and an additional prompt. This is part of the work to ensure that if you do get bad content on your machine it cannot run with elevated privileges and do nefarious things. Users should exercise caution whenever the information bar appears and be sure that this is really content they...